Dashed dream

On January 20, U.S. President Barack Obama delivered the customary State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress. Like every politician in the world, on such occasions American presidents try to paint the best picture possible of the state of affairs in the country.Obama is no exception. To be sure the president, unlike his predecessor a reality-based statesman, could not present a wholly rosy report. But the general tone of the speech was upbeat and optimistic, stressing the administration’s accomplishments, especially the Affordable Care Act. And, despite an economy that isn’t growing as fast as the administration wants, Obama pointed to sustained job growth over the last several years. Like every president, Obama declared that the state of the union is strong.

The American people, however, take a starkly different and decidedly more negative view of things, especially where it most concerns them. Sociologists call that “life chances,” which for Americans comes down to the prospects that they and their children will improve their lot in life. Today, Americans wouldn’t bet a nickel on their life chances.

Evidence for this assertion comes from a new McClatchy-Marist survey. The results of the poll were reported in a Valentine’s Day article in The Miami Herald under the telling headline: “Poll: American dream? A Mirage.”

The conclusions of the study are sobering and should especially alarm complacent U.S. political and economic elites who like things more or less as they are and who think the people share their view.

• “Americans are overwhelmingly pessimistic about their chances of achieving and sustaining the American dream.

• “They see an economic system where they have to work harder than ever to get ahead, and a political system that is unresponsive to their needs.

• “They see the wealthy allowed to play by a different set of rules from everyone else.

• “Eight out of 10 Americans think it’s harder now than before, taking more effort to get ahead than it did for previous generations. Just 15 percent think it takes the same effort as it did before and a scant 5 percent think it is easier now.

• “Americans don’t think it will get better soon, with 78 percent thinking it will also be harder for the next generation to get ahead.

• “Americans think by 75-22 percent that U.S. corporations make stockholders their top priority, not employees.”

An inescapable implication of these findings is that the vast majority of the American people think the state of the union is bad. The data as well suggest other important implications and raise significant questions.

Before discussing these let’s be clear that this is not about dissatisfaction with Obama, as Republicans are sure to argue. Americans polled viewed the problems that afflict them as systemic and class-related, and they fear they will get worse for future generations long after Obama has left the White House.

One valid conclusion, however, is that Americans are astonishingly clear-eyed about what is really happening to their life chances and those of future generations. Their perceptions mirror the findings of countless social science studies.

For example, several studies have shown that unlike in the era where the mythos of the American dream was constructed, today there is more upward social mobility, or getting ahead, in Europe than in the United States. The archetypical American rags-to-riches story has become obsolete.

As well, the exhaustive data on economic inequality, which is greater in this country than in any other developed nation, is both cause and effect of the fact that here and now the rich are allowed to play by different rules. In fact, they usually write the rules by which they play and surprisingly they tend to win big. Meanwhile, middle class living standards have stagnated or declined for a generation. Blue-collar workers have experienced actual downward mobility. And the poor aren’t even on the radar other than to repeatedly cut their meager government benefits or to demonize and dehumanize them.

While Americans are lucid and virtually unanimous regarding the status quo and the general trends as they affect them, where there is no consensus is as to what or who is responsible for the reversal in their fates or what to do about it. What is obvious to, say, Pope Francis and to hundreds of millions of other people around the world, that the calamities that have befallen so many have happened during an era utterly dominated ideologically and practically by the deity Market, which stands above such trivialities as human needs and social justice, is unthinkable to most Americans. At least until now, they just don’t connect the dots that way.

Instead, amid the implosion of the American dream, Americans are vulnerable to manipulation by demagogues with no shortage of scapegoats to blame, who are invariably the powerless—immigrants, minorities, recipients of government assistance. Then there is the biggest target of all, “the government,” but only to the extent that it helps or doesn’t crack down hard enough on the benighted groups enumerated above and when it stands in the way of Market. Such a road leads at best to a dead end but more likely creates a viscous circle.

“What happens to a dream deferred?” asked the black American poet Countee Cullen, warning of the ominous consequences of continued racial oppression. Today we might ask, what happens to a dream dashed, destroyed, downsized, demolished?